what's the essence of the defense? >> well, the defense is first of all there was no fraud. there was no intent on the part of standard & poor's to say anything, to rate anything other than what they thought the rating was it's perfectly true that they were internal debates, that there are some e-mails going back and forth by angry people, sometimes accusatory of each other but the underlying reality here is that the ratings at issue in this case are not only the same as that from other ratings agencies but based on the same view of the economy that the secretary of the treasury, mr. paulson, had. and the head of the council of economic advisors had and the people in the fed had that this was not an outlying view. there was a view as to by how much the housing market might go down which was central to all of this and there was disagreement but the notion that fraud on the part of s&p for basically agreeing with all of these people about where the economy stood and how it was going was fanciful. >> brown: several issues you've raised there but let's go to the e-mails. some of